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After Four Decades, Pioneer of Calculator Still Leads K-12 Field

mary | 30 October, 2007 09:32

From Education Week
By Andrew Trotter

Not all educators agree that the best ways to teach mathematics include giving students electronic calculators. But many do, and their view is reflected in the policies and practices of school districts, textbook publishers, testing companies, and state education agencies.

That adds up to profits for Texas Instruments, the Dallas-based semiconductor manufacturer that invented the hand-held calculator 40 years ago and dominates the school market for the devices today.

The company’s school calculator franchise is protected by a fortress of advantages that its frustrated rivals find hard to penetrate, analysts and educators say. Those include its early lead in the field; its extensive instructional resources and training for teachers; publishers’ inclusion of Texas Instruments-specific lessons as supplements to major math textbooks; and unmatched success at getting districts to buy its calculators or require children to have them.

“Texas Instruments’s genius was to recognize that the key to the acceptance of its technology in schools was tying it to the existing curriculum—everything follows from there,” said Elliot Soloway, a University of Michigan education professor who has developed methods of using hand-held computers in science classrooms. “They got well-accepted by math educators.”

Despite its dominance, analysts point to several potential threats to Texas Instruments’s lead in the school calculator marketplace. The company may be vulnerable on the price front, for example. The tide in math research could turn against calculators. Or the company’s latest generation of new technology, rolled out last month, could fall flat.

A ‘Good Business’

But for now anyway, Texas Instruments holds, by its own reckoning, 60 percent of the market for the scientific and graphing calculators used in middle school, high school, and university-level education. Melendy Lovett, the president of Texas Instruments’s educational technology division, said the company sells between 3 and 4 million graphing calculators per year and has nearly 13 million calculators of all kinds currently in use in schools.

Its two main competitors, Casio. and the Hewlett-Packard, keep mum about their market shares. But Hewlett-Packard is widely used in universities, suggesting that Texas Instruments may claim an even greater chunk of the K-12 market.